Professional Documents
Culture Documents
:
Why does the American judicial system need to be reformed ?
Plan
I - An Unequal Judicial treatment of American citizens
People’s treatment by the justice system is determined by systemic racism and wealth
Intro
I – An Unequal Judicial treatment : All American citizens are not treated the same way by the
justice system : Systemic racism affects people of color and people’s wealth allows them to get
away more easily with crime
Doc A illustrates the fact that there are a lot of prisoners in the United States (a quarter of the world’s prisoners). The
majority of prisoners are people of color → proof that there is a problem in the system. It also proves that the system
must change → “The system must be repaired, they argue”.
→ “two-thirds of African-American men with low levels of schooling will go to prison during their lifetimes. Most
inmates are minority men under age 40 “whose economic opportunities have suffered the most over the last 30 or 40
years. Incarceration in the United States is socially concentrated among very disadvantaged people.”
Ethnicity and people’s economic situation both play a role in incarcerations.
Doc B - Both documents show that people of color like black people or latino people are more likely to go to jail than
white people. On the graph, we can see that there is a disparity between the number of black people imprisoned and the
number of black people in the population in comparison with white people. Black people and white people represent the
same percentage of prisoners despite the fact that black people represent only 13% of the US population compared to
white people who represent 60% of the population.
The bar chart also shows that black people in New York have the highest incarceration rates.
Doc C - Rich people can avoid jail for many reasons : They can pay very expensive bails and can afford the best
attorneys , and if you have the best lawyer, you have more chances “to get away with something like murder’.
DOC D= This document is an opinion piece: cf the use of the pronoun “I” – personal opinion: “I hope that” (l. 21). The
author (Daniel Garcia) deals with the link between money and justice: he argues that the more money you have, the less
likely you are to be found guilty of a crime.
Daniel Garcia evokes 2 cases: the case of Ethan Couch who commited a crime, comes from a rich family and got away
with 10 years’ probation. And then he mentions the case of O.J. Simpson: a rich celebrity (an famous American football
player) who hired successful lawyers and got away with murder. The point he wants to make in his oped by
mentionning the 2 cases is that if these people were poor, they would have gone to prison.
Kamala Harris doesn’t focus on the answers (prison, fines, arrests…) but on the possibilities of decreasing crimes
before they are commited.
For her, prevention is the key to the problem. She wants to ‘heal the epidemic’ (interesting comparison / interesting
rhetoric !) not by being “tough on crime” but by being “Smart on crime”. She thinks it’s more important to focus on
the origins of criminal behaviours rather than on finding strict responses to them.
In her opinion, prevention can only be possible if the system financially and socially helps American families. The
LIFT the Middle Class Act mentioned in the article is the law that she wants to pass in Congress to provide
Americans who need it with this financial help.